Coffee super-chain Starbucks recently announced that the company would be greatly scaling back their attempt to become a competitive outlet for entertainment. Rather than focusing on the promotion of music in their stores, Starbucks plans to concentrate on increasing their sales of coffee and other drinks (crazy, right?).
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Coffee super-chain Starbucks recently announced that the company would be greatly scaling back their attempt to become a competitive outlet for entertainment. Rather than focusing on the promotion of music in their stores, Starbucks plans to concentrate on increasing their sales of coffee and other drinks (crazy, right?).
Currently, the company has its hands in several areas of the entertainment industry. Each Starbucks store has an entire rack of music handpicked for promotion by the company (sales were said to be dismal by THE NEW YORK TIMES). Artists with albums that have been featured include Alicia Keys, James Blunt, and Ray Charles. After revamping, Starbucks stores will only have slots for four albums for customer purchase.
Starbucks is also breaking some ties with Apple’s iTunes music store. They will no longer carry iTunes gift cards and will discontinue any type of promotional giveaway for the iTunes online store. Stores will, however, still have free Wi-Fi access to iTunes.
Hear Music, Starbucks’ record label created with the intent of promoting new music, is also seeing changes. Control of the label was given to Concord Music, and several high-ranking executives were replaced. The label was also in charge of Starbucks’ XM Radio channel, which was announced in January to be calling it quits in the near future.
Starbucks is just the latest to move away from sales of physical media in a dying industry, but perhaps this was an oversight by the company. Despite the fast-paced, multi-tasking nature of today’s market, sometimes people really do just want coffee from their coffee shop.
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